As if David Bowie’s death earlier this week wasn’t enough of a hit, the news broke this morning that veteran stage and screen actor Alan Rickman had died: also at 69, also of cancer. And, like Bowie, we didn’t even know he was sick.
A character actor who specialized in magnificent bastards, Rickman was a prodigious talent and one who was delightfully self-aware about it: you could feel him taking pleasure in enunciating his dialogue most mellifluously, and in telegraphing thought and emotion with the tiniest of gestures.
Think of the wonnnnnnderful work he does as the dickish Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films, persecuting poor Mr. Potter while hiding a weight of responsibility and secret honour that goes unspoken almost to the end. (It’s a more impressive feat because Rickman was unaware of the character’s loyalties when he started playing the role – J.K. Rowling’s final revelations were years away – and the actor had to make everything he said and did play with a kind of sneering ambivalence.)
Or that fabulous little moment in Die Hard when his stylish thief Hans Gruber, having seized the Nakatomi building with minimal effort, decides not to have Hart Bochner’s yammering idiot Ellis shot on sight, telling the henchman behind his oblivious guest to stand down with barely a flicker across his eyes and a pursing of his lips. It would have barely registered in the room, but on film it’s glorious.
I could go on, but why bother? You already know your favourite Rickman bit, and it’s one that could come from virtually anything he did. His appeal was remarkable, and played to so many different audiences.
Die Hard and the Harry Potter movies, sure, but there’s also his frustrated Shakespearean in Galaxy Quest his frothing Sherriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves Emma Thompson’s duplicitous husband in Love, Actually – scenes made even more painful if you remembered their genuine affection in Ang Lee’s Sense And Sensibility. (And poor Lee, having to go out and do the Oscar nominations just hours after losing a friend.)
For me, though – and, I suspect, a lot of other people – it’s Truly Madly Deeply that cuts the harshest. As a dead man who returns to comfort his surviving lover Nina (Juliet Stevenson), and not-so-gently nudge her away from the memories to which she’d been clinging, Rickman is an exquisite romantic hero.
He speaks softly, moves gently, and does everything he can to project a persona of pure, radiant love – while delicately shading the character with the undercurrent of selfishness Nina had repressed in her mourning. Writer/director Anthony Minghella, who died in 2008, once told me that the brilliance of Rickman’s performance is that he has to show us, entirely without support, that Jamie was “a little bit of a prick” in life – and he wasn’t sure any actor could do it without alienating the audience.
Rickman did it. If you want to see perfection, go and watch that movie … though maybe not today. It’s definitely too soon.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
